“If it’s the case that we’re spending on organizations that are doing things contrary to government policy, I think that is an inappropriate use of taxpayers’ money and we’ll look to eliminate it.” (Prime Minister Stephen Harper, June 7, 2012).
Earlier this month research scientists in lab coats held a protest lab on Parliament Hill. Their demonstration included a symbolic funeral procession for ‘evidence’ amid Conservative cuts to research funding and federal in-house research capacity. The protest also came on the heels of a federal budget that put the axe to the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE), the First Nations Statistical Institute (FNSI) and the National Council on Welfare (NCW). Taken together, the chop to these three agencies takes just $7.5 million off the federal books – a paltry sum in relation to the value of the public goods they provided and now lost to Canada.
The NCW has been around for nearly half a century, launched of a post-war contract between civil society, federal and provincial governments: federal and provincial governments might argue amongst themselves about who would pay for how much of what, but everyone would rely on the federal government to facilitate dialogue and decision-making by collecting and publishing facts relevant to social policy in Canada. The NCW had originally been a discussion body for federal Deputy Ministers to argue over the (former) Unemployment Insurance program, but when it was reconstituted in 1969, the NCW became a body for the representation and participation of poor Canadians in the policies that affect them. I won’t quibble with anyone who suggests that the NCW may have strayed from or never truly lived up to that 1969 ideal. But it did consistently and with pretty respectable standards fill a residual federal role of feeding the policy discourse with good social data.
The First Nations Statistical Institute never even really got a running start. Created in 2006 alongside other bodies to build sustainable First Nations’ capacity to solve First Nations’ challenges, it promised to fill a real and gaping hole in our national data sets. Did you know that for nearly all of its major surveys, Statistics Canada does not talk to households living on reserves? Neither do most opinion polls by the way. The Institute was supposed to do what Stats Can and other research couldn’t or wouldn’t but in the end it will barely have had time to set up shop, let alone field or report on any major surveys.
And as for the NRTEE, many more eloquent and expert commentators have already keened for it.
The scientists grieving for ‘evidence’ on the Hill have been among the voices suggesting that the link between slashing federal research funding, cuts to federal research jobs (or freedom to publish results), new restrictions on charitable status and the termination of the three arms-length bodies listed above is this: a partisan Conservative attack on voices of dissent. And really, the Harper Conservatives have done little to suggest otherwise. What with John Baird crowing in QP about the end of the NRTEE and the PM’s statement in June, it does seem that Conservatives believe firmly that strategic de-funding of organizations working in opposition to the government’s priorities is entirely natural and normal. In an academic paper (yes, the kind those wonky lab-coat wearing researchers write), a former senior advisor to Harper referred to government funding for activities in opposition to government policy as “a state at war with itself”.
Should we understand this to be a kind of Roman peace then?
It has always been the case that a change in government will mean a change in the go-to or most-favoured stakeholders, the ones who get invited early and often to be part of public consultations or submit proposals for funding. In the 1990s, the Chrétien government even helped kick-start a new think-tank with a series of multi-year block grants. For those who don’t remember Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN), it was known for attracting experts to its research teams and putting out high quality, accessible and policy relevant research. Did it also happen to have a Liberal-friendly streak to its policy recommendations? Yeah, probably. Would it have been critical in a cogent and credible way of recent changes to EI and OAS among others? Odds are good. Not to worry, CPRN’s last federal dollar was cut after the 2006 election and it closed its doors a few years later, finding provincial or other funding sources unsustainable. Funding friendly groups isn’t new or necessarily ethically troublesome for a government as long as it also funds groups and institutions that are neutral or even critical. After all, the Government of Canada is the government for everyone in our country, not just its friends.
The other argument for cutting back on research has come from others in cabinet such as Tony Clement, Peter Kent and Diane Finley in statements (sometimes back-peddling ones) that cuts are nothing more than efficiency gains in a time of austerity.
Ok, let’s take that at face value for a moment. The argument goes something like this: ‘Government doesn’t have a lot of money so we need to re-prioritize. We’d rather spend the little money we have on things that make a real difference and if this research stuff is really so important then someone else in the marketplace will pay for it.’
Uh-huh… Except there’s nothing efficient about creating less knowledge and evidence.
First, recall that the main consumers for research by groups like the NCW, FNSI, NRTEE and (formerly) CPRN are not inside the federal government. Rather the biggest consumers are found in provincial and regional levels, think tanks, community organizations, media outlets and even private sector businesses and associations. The federal government isn’t cutting off its own supply of evidence nearly as much as it is cutting off the supply for everyone else. These non-federal information consumers are still stakeholders for any policy the government might want or need to draft and implement. Only now they are less well-informed stakeholders. Good policy discussion, with meaningful public engagement, and good policy outcomes will only get harder.
Next, the assumption that someone else will willingly pay for research is flawed as CPRN and many other organizations found through painful experience. Philanthropic foundations in Canada are few in number, small compared to American counterparts and tend to prioritize programs over policy work where results and impacts are hard to evaluate or report on. The private sector has little or no interest in funding data collection for public policy-makers and lacks the public trust needed to make the information credible. Academics can do some but they depend on federal funding and access to good federal data. Provincial governments, if they have any research capacity at all, only look at questions in their own backyards. Why would the Government of Alberta pay to find out about welfare rates in PEI? This is even setting aside the enormous looming challenge to the fiscal capacity of provincial governments – if any level of government in Canada has a cost-cutting rationale for limiting research bucks it’s the provinces.
So if not the federal government, then no-one will be producing much of the policy-relevant evidence that has greased the wheels and cogs of how our country makes decisions on the environment, social programs and so much more. We have all become a little more doltish.
If not a pure partisan attack on dissent and not efficient cost-saving, is it possible the underlying pattern to the Conservative cuts is obscurantism? Are they the only political party guilty of it?
Like water filling cracks in a foundation, a mean and divisive type of partisanship is widely acknowledged to be seeping into and rotting our politics. This rot is not unrelated to the decline of evidence (I’m not ready to call evidence “dead”).
The substitute for evidence in government decision-making is opinion or ideology. It takes little or no evidence to persuade a hyper-partisan that their party’s position is “good” and the other parties’ positions are “bad”, maybe a bit like Orwellian farm animals. Hyper-partisans also have little need for or real interest in non-partisan or apolitical experts. The hyper-partisan already has ideology to guide them through what to think and, more importantly, what to think about. To them, a steady supply of information or evidence is…unhelpful.
When evidence is in short supply, why should we be surprised if parties of all stripes argue loudly and blindly past each other, struggling to be perpetually more opinionated if they can’t be more informed than their opponents? The saddest part of all is that the decline of evidence ultimately means communities and voters will have a harder time sorting out splinters of truth from unfounded opinion.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Jennifer Robson
Earlier this month research scientists in lab coats held a protest lab on Parliament Hill. Their demonstration included a symbolic funeral procession for ‘evidence’ amid Conservative cuts to research funding and federal in-house research capacity. The protest also came on the heels of a federal budget that put the axe to the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE), the First Nations Statistical Institute (FNSI) and the National Council on Welfare (NCW). Taken together, the chop to these three agencies takes just $7.5 million off the federal books – a paltry sum in relation to the value of the public goods they provided and now lost to Canada.
The NCW has been around for nearly half a century, launched of a post-war contract between civil society, federal and provincial governments: federal and provincial governments might argue amongst themselves about who would pay for how much of what, but everyone would rely on the federal government to facilitate dialogue and decision-making by collecting and publishing facts relevant to social policy in Canada. The NCW had originally been a discussion body for federal Deputy Ministers to argue over the (former) Unemployment Insurance program, but when it was reconstituted in 1969, the NCW became a body for the representation and participation of poor Canadians in the policies that affect them. I won’t quibble with anyone who suggests that the NCW may have strayed from or never truly lived up to that 1969 ideal. But it did consistently and with pretty respectable standards fill a residual federal role of feeding the policy discourse with good social data.
The First Nations Statistical Institute never even really got a running start. Created in 2006 alongside other bodies to build sustainable First Nations’ capacity to solve First Nations’ challenges, it promised to fill a real and gaping hole in our national data sets. Did you know that for nearly all of its major surveys, Statistics Canada does not talk to households living on reserves? Neither do most opinion polls by the way. The Institute was supposed to do what Stats Can and other research couldn’t or wouldn’t but in the end it will barely have had time to set up shop, let alone field or report on any major surveys.
And as for the NRTEE, many more eloquent and expert commentators have already keened for it.
The scientists grieving for ‘evidence’ on the Hill have been among the voices suggesting that the link between slashing federal research funding, cuts to federal research jobs (or freedom to publish results), new restrictions on charitable status and the termination of the three arms-length bodies listed above is this: a partisan Conservative attack on voices of dissent. And really, the Harper Conservatives have done little to suggest otherwise. What with John Baird crowing in QP about the end of the NRTEE and the PM’s statement in June, it does seem that Conservatives believe firmly that strategic de-funding of organizations working in opposition to the government’s priorities is entirely natural and normal. In an academic paper (yes, the kind those wonky lab-coat wearing researchers write), a former senior advisor to Harper referred to government funding for activities in opposition to government policy as “a state at war with itself”.
Should we understand this to be a kind of Roman peace then?
It has always been the case that a change in government will mean a change in the go-to or most-favoured stakeholders, the ones who get invited early and often to be part of public consultations or submit proposals for funding. In the 1990s, the Chrétien government even helped kick-start a new think-tank with a series of multi-year block grants. For those who don’t remember Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN), it was known for attracting experts to its research teams and putting out high quality, accessible and policy relevant research. Did it also happen to have a Liberal-friendly streak to its policy recommendations? Yeah, probably. Would it have been critical in a cogent and credible way of recent changes to EI and OAS among others? Odds are good. Not to worry, CPRN’s last federal dollar was cut after the 2006 election and it closed its doors a few years later, finding provincial or other funding sources unsustainable. Funding friendly groups isn’t new or necessarily ethically troublesome for a government as long as it also funds groups and institutions that are neutral or even critical. After all, the Government of Canada is the government for everyone in our country, not just its friends.
The other argument for cutting back on research has come from others in cabinet such as Tony Clement, Peter Kent and Diane Finley in statements (sometimes back-peddling ones) that cuts are nothing more than efficiency gains in a time of austerity.
Ok, let’s take that at face value for a moment. The argument goes something like this: ‘Government doesn’t have a lot of money so we need to re-prioritize. We’d rather spend the little money we have on things that make a real difference and if this research stuff is really so important then someone else in the marketplace will pay for it.’
Uh-huh… Except there’s nothing efficient about creating less knowledge and evidence.
First, recall that the main consumers for research by groups like the NCW, FNSI, NRTEE and (formerly) CPRN are not inside the federal government. Rather the biggest consumers are found in provincial and regional levels, think tanks, community organizations, media outlets and even private sector businesses and associations. The federal government isn’t cutting off its own supply of evidence nearly as much as it is cutting off the supply for everyone else. These non-federal information consumers are still stakeholders for any policy the government might want or need to draft and implement. Only now they are less well-informed stakeholders. Good policy discussion, with meaningful public engagement, and good policy outcomes will only get harder.
Next, the assumption that someone else will willingly pay for research is flawed as CPRN and many other organizations found through painful experience. Philanthropic foundations in Canada are few in number, small compared to American counterparts and tend to prioritize programs over policy work where results and impacts are hard to evaluate or report on. The private sector has little or no interest in funding data collection for public policy-makers and lacks the public trust needed to make the information credible. Academics can do some but they depend on federal funding and access to good federal data. Provincial governments, if they have any research capacity at all, only look at questions in their own backyards. Why would the Government of Alberta pay to find out about welfare rates in PEI? This is even setting aside the enormous looming challenge to the fiscal capacity of provincial governments – if any level of government in Canada has a cost-cutting rationale for limiting research bucks it’s the provinces.
So if not the federal government, then no-one will be producing much of the policy-relevant evidence that has greased the wheels and cogs of how our country makes decisions on the environment, social programs and so much more. We have all become a little more doltish.
If not a pure partisan attack on dissent and not efficient cost-saving, is it possible the underlying pattern to the Conservative cuts is obscurantism? Are they the only political party guilty of it?
Like water filling cracks in a foundation, a mean and divisive type of partisanship is widely acknowledged to be seeping into and rotting our politics. This rot is not unrelated to the decline of evidence (I’m not ready to call evidence “dead”).
The substitute for evidence in government decision-making is opinion or ideology. It takes little or no evidence to persuade a hyper-partisan that their party’s position is “good” and the other parties’ positions are “bad”, maybe a bit like Orwellian farm animals. Hyper-partisans also have little need for or real interest in non-partisan or apolitical experts. The hyper-partisan already has ideology to guide them through what to think and, more importantly, what to think about. To them, a steady supply of information or evidence is…unhelpful.
When evidence is in short supply, why should we be surprised if parties of all stripes argue loudly and blindly past each other, struggling to be perpetually more opinionated if they can’t be more informed than their opponents? The saddest part of all is that the decline of evidence ultimately means communities and voters will have a harder time sorting out splinters of truth from unfounded opinion.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Jennifer Robson
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